Days 136-139: Back-2-Back Overnight Retreats (1/11-1/14/20)

Yes, you read that correctly. We are having our first and second overnight retreats on the road in the next four days. One at Immaculate Conception here in New Richmond, WI Sat. and Sun., and another at Our Lady of the Lake in Ashland, WI Mon. and Tues. This first retreat didn’t start till 1pm, leaving us time in the morning to pray and proper for the weekend. This was a confirmation group, which can always be scary since they are usually forced to go on the retreat. Plus, the last time we did a weekend overnight retreat was during training, and it was the hardest retreat ever. It would be a little more difficult because Evan is out sick, and Adam wasn’t feeling too hot either. Once we started, though, we knew this would’ve be any ordinary group. The youth were super rowdy, especially the boys. They were led by CJ, a 6’5” tall sophomore who played basketball, and is really good at it too. He is the starting point guard for New Richmond high school, and learned the day before he is leading the all sophomores in the state of Wisconsin in points per game (19). So i put him in my small group, and he was awesome. He may be the alpha, but he wanted to participate in the activities, making the others want to show up too. Turns out, many of the guys have known eachother growing up for years, and really all the guys had lots of camaraderie and connections. Hence, when it came time for Men’s Session during the retreat, it was easily the best one yet! They continued to build that camaraderie, and it was so beautiful. So overall, it was an amazing retreat, and they all enjoyed it too. During share your retreat experience time at the end of the retreat, many admitted coming in with a negative mindset, but really enjoyed the weekend when it was all said and done! But once Sunday afternoon came around, and all the retreatants left, we were gone in a split too. Off to Ashland, which is right on Lake Superior. We arrived at 8:00pm at a lake house and two cabins for us, overlooking the frozen lake. Man, i cant imagine how it looks in the summertime! Turns out we’ll be at these houses for a few days, so hopefully I’ll get some photos out of it. . . We had to go out to a campsite for our second overnight retreat, whose name i never learned, but we got out there at around 8:00am. This overnight retreat was for a middle school group, 6-8th grade class at Our Lady of the Lake. There were many cool things and weird things about this retreat. One cool thing was the Campsite supervisors, Steve. He just bought the camp, and had a really cool life story. He also had two hawks, one of them i held on my arm, and a really sick drone that had tons of high-class tech, and looked absolutely gorgeous flying in the air. Another fun thing, the snow. We got to sled down an intense hill through a ton of trees, and it was so much fun. One of the weird things was the retreat though. For the first time ever, it felt as if the retreatants were too childish and immature to even understand God in their heart, mainly because they had lots of surface level issues in the community, such as respecting one another. The team still had a good time, but the youth weren’t as happy and excited as we were. We returned home at around 3:30pm on Tuesday, did team prayer and Men’s Session. The women asked us to go to our cabins until asked, knowing that they were going to do something for us. When asked to come in, we were chilling out until they did something recognizable. They were starting a retreat. Yes, the sisters put on a BET retreat for us (Brotherhood Entertainment Time). It had all the parts of a retreat: skits unique to us, dinner, testimonies about how good we have been to them, and a prayer ministry where they wrote cards for us and prayed over us as they played praise songs on the guitar. It was truly an incredible way to honor us, and there’s certainly not many better ways they could honor us from hereon out. This team is so loved and so loving, and I’m so beyond grateful for them.